California Lawmaker to Introduce Bill to Free up Funding for Retrofits

California state Sen. Majority Leader Bob Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys, on Tuesday announced a bill to allocate $1 billion in funding over the next 10 years to retrofit homes across California.

The bill was timed to follow the 25th anniversary of the Northridge Earthquake that took place in January 1994. More than 60,000 single-family houses, apartments and mobile homes were destroyed or rendered temporarily unlivable in the wake of the earthquake, which caused $20 billion in household damage and left 22,000 people homeless.

The California Earthquake Authority in 2014 launched the Brace & Bolt program, under which the CEA has retrofitted more than 4,000 homes in Los Angeles County alone.

Hertzberg’s legislation, which will be formally introduced later this month, restructures the CEA’s finances to free up money that will be used to fund retrofits of homes.

“For more than a million California houses, a code-compliant retrofit could cost just a few thousand dollars,” Hertzberg said in a statement. “And it could prevent a family from losing everything. It could be the difference between life and death.”

Hertzberg represents nearly 1 million San Fernando Valley residents of Senate District 18.